[Prepared for preaching November 22, 2020, in online worship at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y.]
Today is November 22.
Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, designated in many Christian churches as Christ the King Sunday. Next week we begin Advent.
Pope Pius XI established Christ the King Sunday in 1925 to counter secularism and the rise of Communism and fascism. By intention or coincidence, the festival of Christ the King also landed on the last Sunday in October, coinciding with the Protestant celebration of the Reformation.
The celebration is a bit outdated in American democracy because most of us no longer think of kings as representing the highest form of authority over us and, besides, it’s a gender-specific term. Sexist. Many churches now refer to the feast day as the Reign of Christ Sunday.
Whichever designation you prefer, it is nice to end this liturgical year with a reminder that over it all – over Covid, over quarantines, over family separations, over job losses, over church and school closings, over bitter political divisions – has been the love of God and Christ Jesus.
Thank you Jesus.
For the past several weeks we have been following the biblical record of the exile, the struggles of God’s people to understand the pendulum swings of fate as they wonder if God was still on their side. As we roll open Jeremiah’s scroll, we read words addressed to people who suspect God has deserted them. They have lost their homeland, they have lost hope, they believe the covenant God made with them at Sinai is moot, and they think God no longer protects them from harm.
After this long year of 2020, we understand how they feel.
Do you remember the first time you felt this kind of despair?
For persons of a certain age, this date, November 22, will always be remembered as the day Kennedy died.
I was 17 on November 22, 1963, and the horrible events of that day are forever in my memory. There has not been a November 22 in the past fifty-seven years that I have not thought about it or sadly commented about it.
My six children are sympathetic but, frankly, they don’t understand it.
All six were born after 1976. For them, the smiling young face of JFK is an etching on a half-dollar, a faded visage in an old textbook, a ghostly image on a decaying television film. He is as distant to them as Lincoln, as pertinent to their lives as Rutherford B. Hayes.
But they can see it was different for my generation. JFK was my boyhood idol and I read everything I could find about him. I watched most of his 64 televised press conferences, never missed his addresses to the nation on Civil Rights, knew the names of all his Cabinet members. I loved him.
When he was – as Billy Joel put it – blown away, I was devastated. One writer wrote that Kennedy’s death “was the great semi-colon of my life,” and I know what he met. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Kennedy adviser, wrote of his conversation with journalist Mary McGrory. “We’ll never laugh again,” McGrory said. “Heavens, Mary, we will laugh again,” Moynihan replied. “It’s just that we will never be young again.”
At 17, that’s how I felt. Nothing seemed the same after JFK died. Life was no longer predictable. The world was no longer safe. The map to our future was no longer clear.
In a real sense, 180 million Americans found themselves in exile.
To be sure, the Kennedy years – and the years of FDR, Harry, and Ike that preceded them – were not idyllic. Earlier generations faced the flu epidemic of 1918, the crushing racism that led to the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee and African Americans at Tulsa, widespread lynching’s, the Second World War, the nuclear arms race.
It took me a long time after Kennedy died to realize that despair is a normal part of life, that happiness is not guaranteed, that tomorrow is not promised to any of us. In this year of Coronatide, it has been particularly difficult to throw off the heavy weight of gloom.
So it was for Jeremiah and the people he was called to reassure. God, in fact, has not deserted them. God was always among them even when they couldn’t sense God’s presence. And God’s covenant will always be new and renewed for each generation.
Kathryn M Schifferdecker, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, notes that the Old Testament themes of a renewing covenant and “God’s overwhelming grace” are fitting for the celebration of Christ the King Sunday.
“Martin Luther did not believe that he had discovered something radically new in Scripture when he found there the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith,” Schifferdecker writers.
“He rediscovered a treasure that the church of his day had largely lost. The movement he began was as much a restoration as a reformation — the rediscovery of God’s abundant grace in the new covenant established in and through Jesus Christ.”
The longer we live, the more we sense the ebbs and flows of life, the ups and downs of our daily existence, the imbalance between the number of times we feel joy and the periods of discouragement and despair.
We also realize, the longer we live, how true it is that we are simultaneously sinners and saints. Simul Justus at peccator. If the covenant between God and persons is broken, it is because we are flawed human beings and we go astray – following our own desires or turning our backs on the God who never desserts us.
That God is always loving and faithful to us, despite our despair, despite our wandering, is the prophet’s message to us:
The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
That is a message of great joy – a message Schifferdecker suggests should be proclaimed with trumpets. “In and through Jesus Christ, the God of Jeremiah continues to forgive, renew, reform, and call God’s people into right relationship with God and with one another,” she writes.
‘Know the LORD, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
And that is how we know we shall get through our times of exile, our Coronatide, our times of loneliness, frustration, and despair.
Because God is faithful.
And God’s unconditional love for each of us never ends.
